I offer this paper first *in the context of the Holocaust, *particularly of the specific experience of

the of the authors, who was a child of survivors and who replaced siblings who were murdered by
the Germans. Still, there is an obvious parallel in the context of the cultural revolution in China, in
which 30 million people lost their lives, many of them children. Furthermore, we hypothesize that
many only children harbor the fantasy that they once had siblings who died in the womb while
they survived, and so experience themselves as replacement children, cf Arlow China since
1978 has been a nation of only children; if this hypothesis is correct, on a deep psychological
level it has become a nation of replacement children, as well. Obviously if a child in a one-child
family dies, one would expect there to be considerable effort to replace the lost child, if that is
biologically possible. Finally, I would like to add a personal note that was not included in the first
draft of the paper. My first name Arnold was *purchased* for $50 from my mother by two
spinsters sisters, who wanted a replacement for their brother Aaron. My middle name, David, was
the name of my fathers younger brother. Petluras White Russian bandits came to my fathers
town looking for my father, who was a Bolshevik and the librarian for a unit of Trotskys Red
Army. They mistook my uncle for my father because he was wearing my fathers hat, and killed
him.

(2000 Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 55:301318)

The Replacement Child: Variations on a Theme in History and

Psychoanalysis
Leon Anisfeld, D.S.W. and Arnold D. Richards, M.D.
This paper reviews the literature on the replacement child syndrome and examines its
historical, theoretical, and biographical ramifications. Although a replacement child in a
literal sense is one conceived to take the place of a deceased sibling, the concept may be
extended to many other situations in which a child is put in the place of someone else in
the family system. In his experience of survivor guilt for his deceased brother Julius,
Freud may be regarded as such a metaphorical replacement child. The collective tragedy
of the Holocaust gives the replacement child concept a special meaning, since the
children born in its aftermath had to fill the void in the lives not only of individual
parents but of the Jewish people as a whole. One of the coauthors of this paper, Leon
Anisfeld, was born after World War II to parents who had lost previous spouses and
children, and his personal experience as a replacement child informs the theoretical
issues considered here.
The Theme of Survivor Guilt Inheres in the Very Origins of Psychoanalysis. In his letter
to Wilhelm Fliess on October 3, 1897, Freud declares that he greeted the birth of his
brother Julius with adverse
Leon S. Anisfeld is assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at Mount Sinai School of
Medicine and adjunct assistant professor of psychology at Baruch College of the City
University of New York (CUNY). Arnold Richards is editor of the Journal of the
American Psychoanalytic Association.
The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child 55, ed. Albert J. Solnit, Peter B. Neubauer,
Samuel Abrams, and A. Scott Dowling (Yale University Press, copyright 2000 by
Albert J. Solnit, Peter B. Neubauer, Samuel Abrams, and A. Scott Dowling).
- 301 -

wishes and genuine childhood jealousy, and that Julius' s death, when he himself was
less than two years of age, left the germ of reproaches in him. He adds that his
relationships to Julius and to his half-nephew John, who was his elder by a year, have
determined what is neurotic, but also what is intense, in all my friendships (Masson,
1985, p. 268).
As every student of psychoanalysis knows, this letter comes at the turning point in Freud'
s self-analysis. It immediately follows the letter in which he repudiates the seduction
theory and precedes that in which he first ventures his interpretations of Oedipus Rex and
Hamlet. It is likewise generally known that in the Non vixit dream in The
Interpretation of Dreams, Freud restates his insight from the letter to Fliess, but omits any
mention of Julius. As he writes, My emotional life has always insisted that I should have
an intimate friend and a hated enemy, and all my friends have in a certain sense been
re-incarnations of John (1900, p. 483).
We sound these familiar refrains because they introduce the theme of the replacement
child that is the focus of this paper. Although even in psychoanalytic writing it is
relatively rare for authors to acknowledge the subjective motivations that inform their
work, we cannot avoid doing so here. For one of us (L.A.) is a replacement child, born in
1948 in a D.P. camp outside Berlin to parents who had both been previously married to
other spouses, with whom they had had children. His sister, Ina, was born two years later
in Munich, where his parents had gone to search for their families of origin. All had been
murdered by the Nazishis parents parents and fourteen of their children, seven in each
family.
In Munich his parents also looked for the families of their first marriages. His mother' s
first husband, a gentile, was taken away and killed by the Nazis. Their eleven-month-old
daughter died of starvation as his mother fled across the Polish countryside. His father' s
first wife died in a concentration camp, as did their two daughters, both approximately
six years of age. Anisfeld is not certain of their ages because, as so often happens with
Holocaust survivors, the matter was not discussed as he was growing up in New Jersey.
What is more, his father was fifty years old when he was born while his mother was
thirty.1 The author' s father died of a coronary when the author was eleven, in large
measure, he believes, because of the horrors of the war and the losses his father suffered
during the Holocaust.
Thus, he is a replacement child, and both of us, like Jews everywhere, have struggled to
come to terms with the legacy of the defining traumatic
1 This age disparity intriguingly parallels that between Freud' s parents; the forty-yearold Jacob Freud was twenty years older than his wife, Amalie, when Freud was born.
- 302 event of the twentieth century. In this spirit, we offer this paper as a contribution to a
collective act of self-reflection, in the hope that it will inspire readers to bring their own
subjectivity to bear as one or another aspect of our discussion resonates with their
experience.
In the narrowest sense, a replacement child is a child born to parents who have
experienced the death of a child and then conceived a second child in order to fill the
void left by the loss of the first. Other situations may show a similar configuration, as
when one sibling dies at an early age and another must fulfill the expectations the parents

had previously invested in their deceased offspring. Or a couple unable to conceive may
adopt a child, who then has to take the place of the biological child who never was, with
all the parents attendant fantasies. In yet another permutation, a child has a severe
mental or physical handicap; and whether he or she is reared in the family or
institutionalized, the other siblings will inevitably be affected by the demands of their
special brother or sister. As Bergmann and Wolfe (1971) observe, Just as the sick
child wondered why did it happen to me?, many of the healthy children wondered why
did it not happen to me?, or even, can it happen to me? (p. 146). Parental anxiety
typically takes one of two forms, both of which inflict damaging consequences: The
parents are either preoccupied with the sick child and in this way arouse in the healthy
child depressing feelings of being neglected and slighted, or they concentrate on the
healthy child, pushing him to succeed and forcing him to strive for achievements, so that
he might compensate for the inability of the sick child and so alleviate the parents
feeling of failure and defeat. (p. 146)
As Wolfe and Bergmann make clear, even when a child does not literally die, the healthy
sibling may have to cope with survivor guilt and thus be a replacement child. The
psychological dynamics of parents who have themselves survived the trauma of the real
or symbolic death of a child mediate between the sick or deceased child and the sibling
who is his or her surrogate. In the most far-reaching extension of the concept, Jacob
Arlow (1972) has proposed that even an only child experiences sibling rivalry and
survivor guilt because the only child blames himself for the fact that there were no other
children (p. 533). As Arlow contends, What is striking about the survivor guilt of
only children is that it appears whether or not there has actually been a sibling who died
before or after the birth of the only child (p. 514).2 From
2 Irving Leon (1996) remarks that of the four clinical examples in Arlow' s paper, three
described patients who were not only after all, having had siblings who either died,
sometimes at birth, or were institutionalized due to severe difficulties (p. 164).
- 303 this standpoint, there is no great difference between being an only child and a
replacement child since the only child regularly entertains the fantasy that while he was
in his mother' s womb, he eliminated his rivals by devouring them in one way or another
(p. 516). The only child thus holds himself responsible for his status and comes to believe
that the power of his wishes has denied life to an unspecified number of potential
children (p. 516), from whom he then, by the law of talion, fears retribution. In Arlow' s
words, The specific fear was the danger of retaliation from the embryos that had been
destroyed. What the only child unconsciously fears is an encounter with these adversaries
in the claustrum and being devoured from within by the rivals whom he had devoured
and incorporated (p. 533).
As this series of examples suggests, the replacement child in a narrow sense forms part of
a continuum in which the extreme case metamorphoses into one that is normal and even
universal. As Arlow remarks, every first child was for a time an only child, and many
youngest childrenespecially if widely separated in age from their predecessorsmay
entertain a similar fantasy: The early attitudes of the oldest child, formed during the
period when he was an only child, are overlaid with the subsequent conflict connected
with the birth of a younger sibling (p. 513). This insight is relevant to Freud, who, after
a fleeting period as his mother' s only child, was succeeded first by Julius and then by

Anna, whose arrival caused the temporary disappearance of his mother (on the heels of
the arrest of his nurse), which Freud symbolized in his half-brother Philipp' s joking
expression that his mother had been boxed up. In this extended sense, every child (not
just an only child) is metaphorically a replacement child, the first-born in that he is
replaced by a successor, and the later-born in that he takes the place formerly occupied
by someone else.
In the Ashkenazi tradition, it is customary to name a child after a deceased person, thus
making him or her a replacement not only of another sibling but of the ancestor whose
name has been bestowed as well.3 One of us (L.A.) is named after his mother' s beloved
younger brother, while his sister was named after their mother' s mother, who was
regarded more ambivalently. Each of these names carried its own emotional freight and
had a great deal to do with how the two of them were treated in childhood. But a child
born to Holocaust survivors re-places
3 Interestingly, whereas Freud departed from tradition in naming his own children, his
father gave him the name of Schlomo in memory of his own father, who died three
months before Freud was born (Gay 1990). On the place of memory in Jewish history and
Jewish experience, see Yerushalmi (1982).
- 304 not simply a specific dead child or ancestor but all those who have perished. As
Bergmann and Jucovy (1982) remind us, on Israel' s annual day of commemoration, the
children participate in the mourning ritual and replace for their parents the generation that
perished (p. 24). Such collective rituals of mourning hold out hope for the future for the
Jewish people, but they likewise underscore the incalculable magnitude of the loss. It
might be said that the state of Israel itself is a replacement child for the entire civilization
that was destroyed in the Holocaust.
Leon Berman adduces Those Wrecked by Success and Criminals from a Sense of
Guilt, two of Some Character Types Met with in Psycho-Analytic Work (Freud,
1916), as points of reference for the issues he treats in his paper Sibling Loss as an
Organizer of Unconscious Guilt (1978). He cites Freud' s account in Beyond the
Pleasure Principle (1920) of those individuals whose repetition compulsion shows them
to be in the grip of a fate neurosis: The impression they give is of being pursued by a
malignant fate or possessed by some daemonic power; but psychoanalysis has always
taken the view that their fate is for the most part arranged by themselves and determined
by early infantile influences (p. 21). Berman' s patient, a depressed middle-aged
physician for whom the death of a baby sister he never saw when he was three years of
age was the central trauma of his life, exhibited such a fate neurosis (exemplified by his
twice marrying women who had a son and daughter from a previous marriage). His
unconscious sense of guilt thwarted Berman' s efforts, leading to a negative therapeutic
reaction and an abrupt termination of his analysis. Berman quotes Freud' s remarks added
in 1914 to The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) on children' s jealousy toward new
siblings and the far-reaching effects if their death wishes should be fulfilled: Deaths that
are experienced in this way in childhood may be quickly forgotten in the family, but
psychoanalytic research shows that they have a very important influence on subsequent
neuroses (p. 252).

All the texts Berman cites have an autobiographical dimension, which becomes evident
once one reflects on the fact that Freud had a younger sibling who died in infancy. In his
biography of Freud, Ernest Jones (1955, p. 146) drew on Some Character Types to
propose that Freud was himself wrecked by success when fate fulfilled his death
wishes against Julius. Extending this line of argument, Max Schur (1972, pp. 153-71)
stressed the importance of the Non vixit dream as evidence that Freud was plagued by
a recurring experience of guilt of the survivor, which likewise had its earliest roots in
Julius' s death.
It is clearly no coincidence that the same texts that bear on the topics
- 305 of survivor guilt and the replacement child should have what Freud, in the preface to the
1908 edition of The Interpretation of Dreams, called a further subjective significance
(p. xxvi), although this is often overlooked by commentators concerned with the
theoretical import of Freud' s ideas. If one returns to the 1914 footnote to The
Interpretation of Dreams on the experience of deaths in childhood, one reads in the first
edition:
Children at that time of life [less than three] are capable of jealousy of any degree of
intensity and obviousness. Again, if it should happen that the baby sister does in fact
disappear after a short while, the elder child will find the whole affection of the
household once more concentrated upon himself. If after that the stork should bring yet
another baby, it seems only logical that the little favorite should nourish a wish that his
new competitor may meet with the same fate as the earlier one, so that he himself may be
as happy as he was originally and during the interval (1900, pp. 251-52).
Apart from the reference to a baby sister instead of a brother, this passage describes
Freud' s own experience as an elder child whose reign as the little favorite was
interrupted by the arrival of Julius, whose disappearance after a short while caused the
whole affection of the household to be once more concentrated upon himself. But
when the stork inconveniently brought yet another babyin this case, Freud' s sister
Annahe nourish[ed] a wish that his new competitor may meet with the same fate as
the earlier one, so that he might once again be the adored only child.
The type of reading we have offered of this passage from The Interpretation of Dreams
can be profitably employed at many points in Freud' s writings. In The Psychoanalytic
Literature on Siblings, Colonna and Newman (1983) aptly note that Freud placed
particular emphasis upon the feelings of the older child toward the new sibling (p. 286).
They quite the Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis: A child who has been put into
second place by the birth of a brother or sister and who is now for the first time almost
isolated from his mother, does not easily forgive her this loss of place; feelings which in
an adult would be described as greatly embittered arise in him and are often the basis of a
permanent estrangement (1916-17, p. 334). Freud concentrates on the displaced child' s
animosity toward his mother rather than on his feelings of sibling rivalry, but his
observations are relevant to his own case. Like Berman, however, Colonna and Newman
overlook the subjective dimension of Freud' s remarks and assert: that since so many of
Freud' s discoveries derived from his clinical observations of patients, it is not surprising
that the emphasis on the role of siblings in the formation
- 306 -

of neurosis seems to predominate (p. 292). But if Freud highlighted sibling rivalry as a
factor in neurosis and saw the situation maninly from the standpoint of the older child, it
is because he experienced its effects in his own childhood long before he made any
clinical observations.
As a final instance of our autobiographical mode of reading, we turn to Beyond the
Pleasure Principle, a pivotal text for the study of the Holocaust because it introduces the
concept of the death instinct.4 Berman, as we have seen, quotes Freud' s account of the
workings of a fate neurosis exhibited by normal people. Freud offers a series of
illustrative vignettes:
Thus we have come across people all of whose human relationships have the same
outcome: such as the benefactor who is abandoned in anger after a time by each of his
protgs, however much they may otherwise differ from each other, and who thus seems
doomed to taste all the bitterness of ingratitude; or the man whose friendships all end in
betrayal by his friend; or the man who time after time in the course of his life raises
someone else into a position of great power or public authority and then, after a certain
interval, himself upsets that authority and replaces him by a new one (1920, p. 22).
By now it should not be surprising that each of these ostensibly fictional sketches is a
disguised confessionindeed, three versions of the same story. It is Freud himself who is
in the grip of the repetition compulsion, which causes him to taste the bitterness of
ingratitude when he is betrayed or abandoned because all of [his] human relationships
have the same outcome.
But if Freud' s texts that bear on the death of a sibling and survivor guilt are tacitly
autobiographical, it remains to ask why this further subjective significance should be
latent rather than manifest in the text. In part this may be due to Freud' s reluctance to
bare more of his soul in public than necessary. Beyond this deliberate aspect of Freud' s
self-concealment, however, there is a sense in which the autobiographical component of
his theoretical writing remains veiled and unconscious by virtue of the nature of trauma
itself. As literary critic Cathy Caruth has argued, citing Freud' s comparison in Moses and
Monotheism between the deferred effects of a traumatic neurosis in an accident and that
experienced by the Jewish people following their murder of Moses, it is crucial to Freud'
s concept of trauma that there be an inherent
4 For a profound meditation on trauma and the Holocaust using the concept of the death
instinct, see Laub (1998).
- 307 latency within the experience itself. The historical power of the trauma is not just that the
experience is repeated after its forgetting, but that it is only in and through its inherent
forgetting that it is first experienced at all (Caruth, 1996, p. 17). Just as trauma can be
experienced only through its forgetting, which is figured temporally as a period of
latency, so it can be remembered only through a later retelling in which the most
important aspects are repressed. It is therefore Freud' s own exemplary status as a
traumatized subject that we can discern by excavating the buried autobiographical layers
of his theoretical texts, though these must in large measure remain unconscious to Freud
himself, no less than to any other writer.
Our investigation has proceeded along three converging paths: (1) a reflection on Freud' s
life and work as inexhaustible sources of psychoanalytic knowledge; (2) an examination

of the theme of the replacement child as it occurs in more or less typical contexts; and (3)
a meditation on the Holocaust as a collective tragedy that defies comprehension, against
the backdrop of which the issues of survival and replacement take on their most urgent
meaning. What we continually find is that an insight that confronts us in any one of these
three contexts also lies in wait in each of the other two, and it is this cumulative
convergence of perspectives that affords us the closest approximation to understanding.
Freud claims in his letter to Fliess that the death of Julius left the germ of reproaches in
him. But how can he be said to have remembered an occurrence that took place when he
was still an infant? It seems probable that the impact of Julius' s death was transmitted to
Freud indirectly through its effects on his mother and his subsequent elaboration of it in
fantasy, rather than as an unmediated experience. As Samuel Slipp (1988) suggests,
Freud' s response to Julius' s death may have been complicated by the fact that it was
preceded only a month earlier by the death of his mother' s brother, also named Julius,
though he nowhere mentions this circumstance. If Amalie Freud was in mourning for
both her son and her brother at the same time that she was pregnant with Anna, it is
unlikely that she would have had much energy left to devote to her first-born; and it may
be for the effects of his mother' s depression as much as for the death of Julius per se that
Freud continues to harbor a lifelong sense of self-reproach.
In a clinical paper dealing with the fantasies of children who take the place of deceased
siblings, Vamik Volkan (1997) introduces the concept of deposit representations, a form
of Klein' s projective identification. In Volkan' s words, This concept refers to a type of
intergenerational transmission where a parent or other important individual
- 308 deposits into a child' s developing self-representation a preformed self-or objectrepresentation that comes from the older individual' s mind (p. 89). A precondition for
the development of the intrapsychic structures characteristic of the replacement child,
according to Volkan, is the permeability between the psychic boundaries of the very
young child and his mother, which allows the various psychic contents to pass from one
to the other' s self-representation (p. 92).
Volkan' s formulation provides a theoretical framework for the observations of Wolfe and
Bergmann about how the psychological dynamics of parents intervene between an
incapacitated or deceased child and the sibling who is the latter' s surrogate. Masud Khan
(1963) has elucidated the mother' s function as a protective shield against trauma for the
infant. Because a depressed mother is often unable to perform this task successfully, this
leads to what Khan calls a cumulative trauma in the child. Some such
intergenerational transmission presumably took place between Amalie and Sigmund
Freud, the effects of which can be traced in Freud' s preoccupation with survivor guilt
and his sense of himself as wrecked by success owing to the death of Julius.
In the Holocaust context, the way the deceased child functions as an intermediary
between the parent and the replacement child is illustrated by the experience of Anisfeld,
who as a child was reminded of his father' s lost children, not because they were ever
spoken about, but because of his father' s periodic absences or dream-like escapes from
the present into the past. These fugue states of his father became Anisfeld' s psychic
reality. That his half-sisters were never spoken about left more room for him to fantasize
about his father' s relationship to these daughters. But rather than reducing the pressure to
live up to the memory of these idealized first childrenwhich is bad enough even in non-

Holocaust families with replacement children, where the dead child is often talked about
continuouslythis intensified it, since Anisfeld and his sister felt as though they were
saving an entire generation of people who were dead. Although his mother initially did
not speak about her baby daughter who had starved to death, she eventually recounted
this story. In contrast to his father, whom Anisfeld imagines gazing into the void and
waiting to rejoin the children who were still present to his mind' s eye, his mother loved
all the people she had lostthe brother and mother after whom she named Leon and Ina,
as well as her daughter, first husband, father, and other siblingsbut also succeeded in
loving her new children for who they were in their own right. How she managed not
simply to survive but to bring Anisfeld and his sister into the world and make it possible
for them to live remains for him a mystery as incomprehensible as the tragedy of the
Holocaust.
- 309 Along with Those Wrecked by Success and Criminals from a Sense of Guilt, the
third paper comprising Some Character Types Met with in Psycho-Analytic Work is
The Exceptions. In this paper, Freud cites Shakespeare' s crippled villain Richard III
as a literary paradigm of those patients whose neuroses were connected with some
experience or suffering to which they had been subjected in their earliest childhood, one
in respect of which they knew themselves to be guiltless, and which they could look upon
as an unjust disadvantage imposed upon them (1916, p. 313).5 From one point of view,
the claim to exceptional treatment on the part of those who have suffered unjustly in
childhood may be regarded as the antithesis of the situation of replacement children,
whose fate is to have been permitted to live where someone else has died. But these two
cases are mirror images of one another. For if to be a replacement child involves a sense
of not having being chosen, it also involves a sense of burden. This dialectic is a version
of the pattern of the oedipal victor, the son or daughter growing up in sole possession
of the opposite-sex parent (most commonly after a divorce), whose triumph is purchased
at the expense of a feeling of guilt for having psychically murdered the parent whose
place he or she has assumed. But more than oedipal dynamics are involved in the case of
the children of Holocaust survivors, for, as Bergmann and Jucovy have shown, the
fantasy is transmitted across the generations that the child has a special mission: his or
her life goals are to be directed at restoring family pride by personal achievement, in
order to heal past injuries (1982, p. 288).
A key factor contributing to the ambivalent feelings of specialness in replacement
children is the overprotectiveness often displayed by their parents, who hold themselves
responsible for the deaths of their previous offspring. Bergmann and Jucovy report that
the replacement children of Holocaust survivors were often passionately protected; and
when they became ill or were even mildly injured, the response of the parent was often
more intense than in an average family or even in one where a child had died from illness
or accident (p. 12). This either leads to spoiling the replacement child or makes him or
her vulnerable and dependent, or both.
The consequences of extreme overprotectiveness can, of course, also be pathological in
replacement children of parents who have nothing to do with the Holocaust. In one of the
first and still most illuminating

5 Freud' s example of Richard III has a heightened poignance for Anisfeld, whose
struggle to accept the unalterable realities of the world entered a new phase when he
contracted multiple sclerosis as a graduate student in his twenties.
- 310 luminating papers on this topic, Albert and Barbara Cain (1964) remark that the mother'
s normal or, in some cases, initially abnormal phobic concerns over illness and accidents
were much magnified. She carried the constant panic-laden fantasy of this child, too,
dying (p. 447). In four of the six cases of substitute children they studied, Cain and
Cain found that the child had been very closely tied to the motherthe world was much
too dangerous a place for the child to move freely and explore. He must stay nearby, lest
something happen. Not surprisingly, the results of such an upbringing were infantile,
immature, home-bound children, with strong passive-dependent elements and widespread
ego restrictions (p. 449).
Valuable support for the Cains conclusions is provided by the Hungarian analyst Terez
Virag (1984). Although Virag' s concern is with the transgenerational transmission of
trauma among Holocaust survivors, her material bears on the replacement child
syndrome.6 In the case of Paul, a phobic boy brought to treatment by his mother because
he resisted going to kindergarten, Virag reports that on one occasion he received an
electric shock from a lamp, following which his mother grabbed him and dashed from the
room. The salient feature in the family' s history is that the mother, born in 1948, sought
to keep secret from Paul the fact of her Jewish origin and that her own mother had been
deported with her parents to Auschwitz, where the latter had been gassed. Paul' s mother,
who had several accidents involving gas poisoning and explosion in her life, was acutely
sensitive to the danger of death from electricity, as she knew that the fence around the
concentration camp was electrically charged. Thus, in this case of a grandchild of the
Holocaust, as well as in others studies by Virag, unconscious identification with the
persecuted or exterminated members of the family was clearly observablethe more
strikingly when the parents never talked about their Jewish origins with their children.
She continues: The symptoms, the play activity, the dreams, and fantasies of the
children made it very clear that they knew about the family secrets (p. 58).
Virag' s narrative exemplifies Volkan' s concept of deposit representations, though it
must remain an open question whether the boy knew of his mother' s anxieties about
electricity before the incident in which he received the shock or whether it took on its
cathexis (Strachey' s
6 Although written before she was able to read Generations of the Holocaust, Virag' s
paper draws on the work of Judith Kestenberg on the children of survivors, which is
included in that volume.
- 311 translation of Besetzung, one definition of which is an electrical charge) of trauma only
after witnessing his mother' s horrified reaction. In any event, Virag' s vignette bears out
Cain and Cain' s emphasis on the tendency even of non-Holocaust parents to magnify
phobic concerns over illness and accidents that seem to threaten their replacement
children. What is more, the mothers proclivity to inhibit their children' s natural desire to
explore the world lest disaster strike is exemplified in Virag' s report by the fact that the
grandmother had tied the daughter to herself in an extreme manner, insisting, for

instance, that they take baths in the same tub even after the daughter had passed
adolescence (p. 52). As she elaborates, the mother becomes unable to detach her child
from herself as gently as she should for she knows that the external world is more likely
to destroy than to nurture the child (p. 57). Little Paul' s kindergarten phobia thus
becomes comprehensible as the third-generational outcome of a dynamic in the family
system, in which his inhibition symbolizes the anxiety transmitted from his grandmother,
the Auschwitz survivor, to his mother, for whom, tragically, this legacy was a shameful
secret.
The behavior of Paul' s mother, although contaminated by the factor of Jewish selfhatred, raises the question of the attitude of the children of Holocaust survivors toward
their parents. Such a childwhether or not literally a replacementinevitably has an
image of parents who were weak or humiliated, although this may be counterbalanced by
a view of them as heroes for having survived the concentration-camo or-deal. In its
negative aspect, the need for a child of Holocaust survivors to come to terms with the
realization that his or her parentsfar from being omnipotentwere actually powerless
can be regarded as the cultural culmination of the famous incident, reported by Freud in
The Interpretation of Dreams, in which his father told him how, in his youth, an antiSemite had knocked his cap off his head and ordered him to get off the pavement. Upon
learning that his father had meekly picked up his cap, Freud was fired with indignation at
his unheroic conduct and consolidated his own identification (bound up with his
inhibitions about traveling to Rome) with the vengeful Hannibal.
In his own childhood, Anisfeld looked upon his parents as heroes for what they had been
through and upon his half-siblings as martyrs. At the same time, he recalls an anecdote
that strikingly parallels that in the life of Freud. As a boy of seven years old, he began
attending a primarily non-Jewishindeed, anti-Jewishschool in southern New Jersey,
where his recently immigrated parents had bought a chicken farm. During one of his first
days at this new school, another child jumped on Anisfeld, bit a chunk out of his back,
and called him a dirty Jew.
- 312 In retaliation, he knocked out the attacker' s two front teeth. When he came home, he told
his parents what had happened; the next day his father accompanied him to the school
and confronted the principal. The principal tried to make light of the incident, but his
father would not let him do so. Anisfeld felt proud of him, but at a deeper level it wasn' t
enough. He wished that his father too had beaten up whoever was responsible for what
happenedthe principal, the child' s father, anyone! Like Freud' s father, Anisfeld' s
fatherwho as a Holocaust survivor knew what anti-Semitism really meantbehaved
with irreproachable dignity under the circumstances; but the boy, in the grip of his own
inner world of fantasy, experienced a bitter feeling of disillusionment.
The last set of issues to be explored can be classified under the dual heading of
incomplete mourning and identity disturbance. Since a replacement child in the strict
sense is one who has been conceived in order to take the place of another child who has
died, the first child has not been properly mournedor even thought of as genuinely
existing at all. Rather, in the parents fantasy, he or she has been magically restored to
life by the birth of the second. As C. Legg and I. Sherik (1976) point out, the premature
replacement of a dead child by a new one may interrupt, distort, and delay the mourning
process but cannot resolve it even though the expectations once held for the dead child

are now transferred to a new one. They caution that in order for such a child to have a
possibility of becoming a person in his own right, there should be an appropriate lapse of
time between the death and either conception or the start of adoption proceedings for a
new child. Along the same lines, Cain and Cain conclude that parents of replacement
children exhibit a distortion of the mourning process, a pseudo resolution of mourning
(1964, p. 452), beginning with the failure to accept the reality of their initial object loss.
If there has been only a pseudo resolution of mourning, the child who has been put in
the place of someone else will necessarily have only a pseudo identity. Cain and Cain
observe that the parents of replacement children compelled them to be like their dead
siblings, to be identical with them, yet made it clear that they would never be accepted as
the same, and could never be really as good (1964, p. 451).
The luxury of having time to wait was not available to Holocaust survivors. Having just
emerged from a shattered and depopulated world, Jews both as individuals and as a group
felt a great urgency to marry and have children as soon as possible. Each new child born
in the D.P. camps was viewed as a phoenix rising from the ashes and celebrated as a
victory over Hitler. At the same time, the impossibility of adequately
- 313 mourning everyone and everything that had been lost frequently gave rise to identity
disturbances in the children of the postwar generation. Anisfeld idealized his parents as
heroes and his perished half-siblings as martyrs, but what were he and his sister? He
could not escape the thought that they were opportunists. He could never be certain that
he was loved for who he was or for the genuineness of his achievements. When he
performed an action from which he reaped a reward at someone else' s expense, he was
convinced that he had initiated it; if his deeds were in any way altruistic, he doubted their
sincerity. He believed that he should have been able to do the impossible and save the
lives of his half-sisters even though he had not yet been born. This grandiose fantasy
paradoxically made him scorn his actual accomplishments as worthless and even led him
to be taken advantage of by others for their own glorification. Being unable to save the
lives of his half-sisters led him, he believes, to treat his sister, Ina, in a manner that would
not reveal to his murdered half-siblings that he loved Ina but not them. I am sure says
Anisfeld, that writing this paper is motivated in large part by my need to apologize to
my sister Ina.
The literary and clinical dimensions of the replacement-child phenomenon have been
probed in a richly suggestive paper by Andrea Sabbadini (1988). For Sabbadini, the key
issue is that of dissociative ego processes, or what Freud (1919) described as the
uncanny. As Sabbadini observes, the replacement or substitute child is treated more as
the embodiment of a memory than as a person in its own right (p. 530). His primary
clinical example, Jill, a woman in her early thirties who suffered from attacks of acute
depressive anxiety, was born exactly nine months after the death of a nine-month-old
sister, Angela. Sabbadini notes that if Jill was conceived on or near the day that her sister
died, in fantasy this could mean that the sexual intercourse responsible for Jill' s birth
had taken place at the same time as Angela' s death (p. 532).
Jill' s fantasy corresponds to a motif regularly found in replacement children and those
afflicted with survivor guilt. It is summed up in the title of Maurice Apprey's 1987 paper,
When One Dies Another One Lives. This is, of course, the law of talion that is so often
revealed in the unconscious thoughts and fantasies of those whose very survival was and

continues to this day to be ruled by an unconscious sense of guilt. If someone else had to
die so that I could live, I must have caused that person' s death, and I will then be haunted
by the ghost of the rival I have slain, who becomes my double. As in the case of the
oedipal victor, triumph and guilt are inextricably fused. Indeed, this is precisely what it
means to be a survivorto be forced to wonder why fate took
- 314 someone else' s life instead of one' s own. As Magda Schoenfeld, born in Hungary after
World War II to a mother who had lost all her family in the camps, told Anisfeld in an
interview, her mother never ceased to lament: Why did she have to live when the others
had died? Why couldn' t she die too? Why did she have to go on? Why did she have to
live to carry on their memory?
It is a striking coincidence that Angela should have died at nine months while Jill was
born nine months after her sister' s death. Such symmetries and repetitions are regular
features of the replacement-child syndrome. A truly uncanny example is provided by
Vincent van Gogh (Nagera 1967). His brother, Vincent Willem van Gogh, was a stillborn baby; one year later to the day, the artist was born and given exactly the same name
(including Willem) as his brother. What is more, he was inscribed in the parish register
under the same number as his brother had been a year earlierthat is, 29and he later
committed suicide on July 29, a few months after the birth of yet another Vincent, his
brother Theo' s child.
In a series of influential papers, George Pollock (1970) has studied the dynamics of
mourning and anniversary reactions. In his view, anniversary reactions result from
unfinished or abnormal mourning, usually from childhood. With the resumption and
resolution of mourning in the therapeutic situation, anniversary phenomena disappear
permanently, leaving memories devoid of conflict (p. 480). If anniversary reactions are
the symptoms of incomplete mourning, what appears to be coincidence in the suicide of
van Gogh can be seen as a psychologically motivated expression of emotional conflicts
dating back to before his birth.
What is more, according to Pollock, in the case of replacement children the dead sibling
usually remains remembered at the age he was at the time of his death, and hence there is
some arrest of the image in the minds of the survivors (p. 478). That the image of the
dead siblingor anyone who is incompletely mournedtends to be introjected at the age
he or she was at the time of death is pertinent to Sabbadini' s case of Jill, where the
symbolic interval of nine months functions to consolidate her identification with her
deceased sister, Angela. In addition to being the term of pregnancy, at nine months
Angela had become a toddler and entered the individuation phase. Her sister' s lethally
dangerous step toward independence (Sabbadini 1988, p. 537) from the mother was
reenacted when Jill experienced an overwhelming fear of death in the weeks preceding
her menarche. Pollock has coined the term double coincidence to describe how the
temporal triggers of anniversary reactions can reinforce each other
- 315 (p. 347), as when a man arrives at the age that his father was at death while the man' s son
is now the age that he was at that time. Pollock contrasts replacement with succession:
In succession we have progression, differentiation, and further development; in
replacement we have the wish to keep time and events as they are or once were (p. 353).
Unfortunately, even when the analyst possesses theoretical understanding and seemingly

inexhaustible patience, the wounds of trauma may be too deep for this transformation to
be possible.
At the conclusion of his chapter World Beyond Metaphor in Generations of the
Holocaust, James Herzog writes:
Elie Wiesel has repeatedly stated that survivors of the Holocaust live in a nightmare
world that can never be understood. Although his opinion has its stark and bitter truth, we
believe that the nightmare can be dispelled; that, through words, analysis can penetrate
the shadowy inner world of the patient, which operates in metaphor, and, by illuminating
it, diminish pain, and heal. Furthermore, analysis can demonstrate how the tragedy of one
generation may be transmitted to the next, and then break the chain of suffering. Then
survivors, children of survivors, and their children can remember, but not relive, and
concentrate on the difficult task of being (1982, p. 119).
This passage eloquently expresses the dilemma with which we have struggled in this
paperthe conflict between despair stemming from our participation in the legacy of the
Holocaust and hope engendered by our belief in the curative powers of analysis. Wiesel' s
pessimistic attitude is echoed even more insistently by Claude Lanzmann, whose eleven
years devoted to the making of Shoah were guided by the conviction that, in his words,
there is an absolute obscenity in the very project of understanding the Holocaust (1991,
p. 478). Much as we admire Lanzmann' s achievement as an artist, however, we share
with Herzog a faith that this cannot be the last word. As Harold Bloom (1991) has put it,
Freud' s peculiar strength was to say what could not be said, or at least to attempt to say
it, thus refusing to be silent in the face of the unsayable (p. 135). As adherents of
analysis, we refuse to be silent in the face of the unsayable, even when that unsayable
thing is the horror of the Holocaust.
Whether or not one is literally a replacement child, there will always be what Selma
Fraiberg and her colleagues have called ghosts in the nursery (1975) whenever there is
a personal or collective history of suffering. But unless the agonizing experiences that
called these ghosts of the past into being can be recalled, and at least imperfectly
communicated through the resources of language and art, they will remain unsaid
forever.
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Article Citation:
Anisfeld, L. and Richards, A. D. (2000). The Replacement Child: Variations on a Theme
in History and Psychoanalysis. Psychoanalytic Study of the Child 55: 301-318